During the first half of the twentieth century scholars tended to dismiss the huge thirteenth-century bi-authored Roman de la rose as an awkward and bewildering Gothic embarrassment, undoubtedly important but lacking narrative coherence or elegance. C. S. Lewis, for example, while praising Guillaume de Lorris's first, much shorter section, characterized its continuation by Jean de Meun as ‘a huge, dishevelled, violent poem of eighteen thousand lines’.1 Ernest Langlois dedicated almost his entire working life to cataloguing the sources and the manuscripts of the Rose, as well as producing a monumental five-volume edition, which is still indispensable today.2 Even he saw Jean as writing a jumbled narrative with no clear plan, in which none of the characters is capable of finishing a story without becoming sidetracked.3 Given such apparent confusion, it is perhaps understandable that, despite its status as the masterpiece of medieval French literature, comparable only to the Divine Comedy in its scope, influence, and reputation, the Rose languished unstudied. When Alan Gunn wrote his rehabilitation of the poem, The Mirror of Love, in 1951, he compared the voluminous criticism produced on Dante's work — enough to fill libraries — with the extreme paucity of studies on the Rose.4 His huge monograph, which stresses the poem's fundamental theoretical unity, despite its two authors and apparent lack of structure and continuity, was instrumental in reversing the course of the modern critical history of the poem. Over the past six decades the Rose has gradually emerged as a coherent, highly structured, and unified work, as opposed to an ungainly mess, and the number of scholarly studies of the poem has proliferated to an extraordinary degree. By 1993 Heather Arden had counted over three hundred books, articles, and notices written between 1965 and 1990,5 and nearly four hundred more appeared between 1990 and 2005. It remains to be seen whether this trend of exponentially increasing scholarly production will continue. Fortunately, in the wake of Arden's annotated bibliography, Herman Braet has produced three articles to help guide the reader around the vast and bafflingly complex corpus of secondary literature.6 Arden's and Braet's invaluable work should be consulted for fuller accounts of recent publications in the field than can be provided here. A useful bibliography of earlier criticism on the Rose will be found in Karl August Ott's Der Rosenroman,7 while the non-exhaustive page on Jean de Meun on the Arlima website is also of value.8 This état présent will offer an account of the striking metamorphosis in the fortune of Rose studies. The Roman de la rose purports to be an account of a prophetic dream that came to its narrator when he was twenty. He enters a wonderful garden, populated by allegorical figures such as Deduit (Delight) and Largece (Generosity). While looking into the fountain of Narcissus, he sees a beautiful Rose and is repeatedly shot by Amor (Cupid). After four thousand lines the first section, written by an author we know as Guillaume de Lorris, finishes without any narrative resolution: the Rose is inaccessible and the Lover-narrator figure is disconsolate. Jean de Meun later adds nearly eighteen thousand lines in which there is little plot. Rather, a different set of allegorical figures offer incredibly complex, richly intertextual, and darkly comic disquisitions on philosophy, psychology, ethics, optics, dreams, and sexual deceit, to name just a few of the varied topics. Jean's section is a continuation of Guillaume's and returns to its themes repeatedly, but by the end of the poem, which represents a scene of sexual climax that manages to be both euphemistic and obscene at the same time, there is no confusing Jean's riotous dreamscape with Guillaume's more elegant narrative. To complicate matters, the narrating voice of each part promises a hidden meaning beneath the allegory, but the meaning is never revealed. This sketch of the poem is necessary for an understanding of some of the issues facing modern scholarship. Is the Rose a unified, complete work or a collection of two poems? What hidden meaning might it conceal? How are we to make sense of the Rose's subject matter, which ranges from Ovidian mythology and satire to political commentary, natural philosophy, and even theology? What is the point of such a complicated text? D. W. Robertson's Preface to Chaucer (1962) is quite clear: if we have been identifying with the narrating Lover, he says, ‘we shall find ourselves immersed, at the close of the poem, in [a] morass of hedonistic sensuality’ — not, for Robertson, a desirable state of affairs.9 According to his line, the doctrine that the Rose transmits is one of moral and theological orthodoxy, which condemns rather than promotes the dangerous pleasures of the erotic. Thus the figure Raison (Reason), who advises the Lover against trusting in Fortune and urges him to abandon his dedication to love, becomes Jean de Meun's spokesperson. Such a position was stoutly defended by John V. Fleming, who saw himself waging a battle against critics who were prepared to believe that a figure called Reason could, in fact, be unreasonable.10 Despite Fleming's best efforts to claim a clear Augustinian moral perspective in the Rose, the overwhelming consensus on both sides of the Atlantic has been to recognize, and even celebrate, the work's ludic irony and its paradox rather than its orthodoxy. In France in the 1970s Jean de Meun was lauded for breaking free of the shackles of Guillaume de Lorris's more rigid, decorous allegory, the most extreme exponent of this view being Jean-Charles Payen, who cast Jean as a kind of proto-Marxist advocate of communism and sexual liberation.11 This narrative of emancipation was applied by R. Howard Bloch to language itself: the second half of the Rose, rather than being an extended didactic investigation of love and the world, ‘incarnates the very undefined principle of semiotic and sexual indeterminacy, free-floating desire, the abrogation of the rule of family and of poetic form’.12 Since the 1980s the main lines of interpretation of the Rose as a whole, and of Jean de Meun's part more particularly, have focused on uncertainty, internal difference, irony, contingency, and deceit as the chief characteristics of the poem. More recently this approach has been increasingly supported by a return to Jean's sources, notably Ovid, Boethius, Alain de Lille, and to the intellectual context of the thirteenth century. But what of Guillaume de Lorris? Like Jean, he has received ever more critical attention since the 1960s, and the whole of David F. Hult's 1986 monograph treated the first part of the Rose in its own right.13 Despite the considerable disparity in the length, complexity, and influence of the two sections, Guillaume's part is often given almost as much consideration as Jean's. Hult's book appeared only two years after the publication of a collection of essays on Guillaume's Rose, brought out for the inclusion of this section (not Jean de Meun's) in the programme of the French agrégation.14 More recently, a second edited collection was published to coincide with Guillaume's return to the agrégation programme in 2012.15 Even in works about the Rose as a whole, it is not uncommon for equal weight to be given to the two poets. In medieval times, by contrast, it was Jean de Meun who was regarded as the more significant author; to consider the first part of the Rose separately from its far more influential continuation is a wholly modern phenomenon. Of over three hundred surviving manuscripts of the Rose, only one — Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), MS fonds français 12786 — contains Guillaume's section independently of Jean's, suggesting that the former's work was generally seen as incomplete in the Middle Ages. Over the past three decades of scholarship, Guillaume de Lorris has emerged as a much more complex and ambiguous author than previously thought, which has led to useful speculation about — if not resolution of — the question of whether such a lack of closure was deliberate. Whether or not Guillaume's unresolved narrative was incomplete, the Rose was not finished when Jean de Meun put down his quill at some point in the 1270s. For the next two hundred and fifty years the text was copied and miscopied, and sometimes reordered, glossed, or enlarged. We know of one monastic adapter of the Rose in the 1290s, Gui de Mori, who not only removed passages he felt to be obscene and reordered other sections, but also added numerous interpolations and named himself as a less famous third writer of the Rose alongside Guillaume and Jean.16 Gui was far from the only adapter, and Sylvia Huot's The ‘Romance of the Rose’ and its Medieval Readers (1993) opened up the messy questions of textual variance that had lain dormant since Langlois's discussion of it in 1910.17 Huot together with Pierre-Yves Badel18 is largely responsible for demarcating the field of the medieval reception of the Roman de la rose, an area that is especially flourishing at the present time. While Huot, in particular, demonstrated its adaption by scribes, remanieurs, and illuminators, Badel showed the extent to which the Rose was remade and reworked by medieval poets, specifically examining its influence on Guillaume de Machaut, who drew on the Rose throughout his career, on Christine de Pizan, who, it seems, strongly disliked it but could not escape its influence, and on Guillaume de Deguileville, who twice attempted to rewrite the poem as an allegory of spiritual progress. Like him or loathe him, any fourteenth- or fifteenth-century poet in England or France had to deal with Jean de Meun, and with the misogynist diatribes, obscenity, and allegory of the Rose. The first literary scandal in French history was the Querelle de la Rose. At the very beginning of the fifteenth century Christine de Pizan and Jean Gerson, Chancellor of the University of Paris, participated in an impassioned and at times acerbic war of words over the ethical content of the poem, which they attacked for obscenity, licentiousness, and dangerous doctrine. Against them, defending Jean de Meun, were Jean de Montreuil and the brothers Pierre and Gontier Col, the latter describing, somewhat implausibly, the Rose's author as a ‘vray catholique, sollempnel maistre et docteur en son temps en sainte theologie, philosophe tres parfont et excellent sachant tout ce qui a entendement humain est scible’ [‘a true Catholic, in his time a solemn master and doctor of holy theology; a thorough philosopher and a most learned humanist’].19 The Querelle has been responsible for its own subfield, particularly since Eric Hicks's edition of the collected documents in the original French and Latin in 1977,20 and study of the public and publicized dispute has shed much light on the source text itself as well as on late medieval intertextuality. Beyond the Querelle great advances have been made in the study of François Villon's reception of the Rose,21 and of Machaut's and Chaucer's reworkings of it. In the case of Chaucer, one cannot help but wish for a more sustained treatment of his relationship with Jean de Meun. Useful work has been done in tracing individual borrowings, particularly the lascivious Wife of Bath's debt to the Rose's La Vieille,22 but the question of the profound influence of the Rose not only on Chaucer but also on John Gower and William Langland is a field that remains largely unexplored.23 The fortunes of the Rose in medieval Italy have attracted some interest, and Luciano Rossi has convincingly identified Jean de Meun as a legal student in Bologna in the 1260s and as a sometime retainer of Charles I of Anjou, later becoming an archdeacon in Orléans in the early 1270s.24 Historically, and with good internal evidence, critics have seen Jean de Meun as very closely associated with the University of Paris; evidence that places him in Italy during part of the period of the Rose's composition suggests the need for further study of the poem's links to Italian culture and literature. With the Rose's dominance of the fourteenth century well documented, the influence of the poem in the later Middle Ages has emerged as a new front in studies of the work's reception. Helen J. Swift's Gender, Writing, and Performance (2008) shows Jean de Meun's legacy stretching into the fifteenth century and even the sixteenth, as does Knowing Poetry (2011) by Adrian Armstrong and Sarah Kay, researched in conjunction with five other scholars.25 The collaborative aspect of the latter project is instructive. As the scope of reception studies has expanded to embrace centuries, geographical areas, and languages (to take into account translations into English, Italian, and Dutch), the majority of the most significant interventions have been multi-authored edited collections. The sprawl of the field is vast, requiring the combined skills of specialists of different periods and disciplines to make the multilingual, two-hundred-and-fifty-year tradition negotiable while also taking into account questions of how the text was decorated and transmitted in manuscripts. The reception revolution was sparked in 1992 by a collection of essays entitled Rethinking the ‘Romance of the Rose’, edited by Kevin Brownlee and Sylvia Huot, which considered manuscript illumination alongside literary questions.26 So far, the focus of this survey has been on literary history and analysis, but the Roman de la rose, which numbers among the most frequently and lavishly decorated texts of the Middle Ages, is also a key work in the field of art history. Alfred Kuhn published the first major article on the iconography of its illumination in 1912, and there has been no shortage of attention since, as demonstrated most recently by the Icorose project on the Rose's iconography at the University of La Laguna.27 Further advances in the study of manuscript illumination will certainly draw on the Roman de la rose Digital Library project, the importance of which cannot be overstated.28 Since 1996 well over a hundred manuscripts have been digitized and made available online, and the website offers exciting perspectives for the comparative study of image and text in the Rose. The growing importance of manuscript and iconography can be seen in De la ‘Rose’: texte, image, fortune, edited by Catherine Bel and Herman Braet (2006), which deliberately followed on from Brownlee and Huot's groundbreaking Rethinking the ‘Romance of the Rose’ (1992).29 In the latter, two of the fourteen chapters were dedicated to manuscript illumination, five to the different Roses of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, and seven to the reception of the text. In Bel and Braet's volume, illumination and the text's composition are given equal weight, with five chapters each; the remaining ten chapters treat the Rose's reception. A more or less even balance between literary analysis and study of the manuscripts can be seen in the more recent Nouvelles de la ‘Rose’ collection edited by Dulce María González-Doreste and María del Pilar Mendoza-Ramos (2011), though with less focus on literary reception.30 By comparison, the study of early printed books of the Rose has been somewhat neglected, although Caitlin Hartigan's recently completed doctoral thesis suggests the potential for the study of printed versions of the Rose in addition to (and alongside) study of the The field is somewhat in no part of the Rose's position at the of French and medieval to disciplines and writing on a whole of will have articles, or of books on a aspect of the poem, such as the or allegory more literary the and the dream or to name just a Medieval of the Rose showed clear and one for example, to found in to the Lover Guillaume's and while most of the of the work Despite its to modern criticism that are no less and than medieval and there is a good case to be made for the that, in of its complexity, and the text deliberately any at an of the whole text. some passages much critical attention than in the of the Rose in the fountain of Narcissus, of the two and the of the of the of the work, even the especially and of The to that as de for the poem, and from theoretical attention on the Querelle has that particularly fifteenth-century and a modern for the over the for example, has a focus on over The importance of for modern literary studies has to Reason and the about and in to the of with far less being in the of particularly exciting has been the focus on questions of and in part to important article that the Rose as and Despite the huge of on the Rose, only a number with the poem as a whole, or shed light on the questions about the poem's meaning and — in particular, Jean de Meun's section — that The past years have seen three that the and two and Sylvia Huot's of In John and D. have produced chapters that offer more accounts of the It is and somewhat that scholars in have this question well With the of of which is largely about and to the text published in no monograph about the Rose has been produced by a French in nearly The with comparable works in Italian and English, of and Chaucer, is the of medieval French literature, as well as the Roman de la obscenity, and to have the work from becoming a literary of the status of the Divine Comedy and The the Rose's with and has never been and the work is a on in and the two for that of and Sarah which is particularly of as a significant critical in its own key area for in the study of the Rose, particularly in the world, the The first modern edition, that of Langlois in is in for its and at the time of writing is on the Bibliothèque nationale de completed almost years and on MS has the scholarly His text can be compared with of and but it remains by far the most useful in of critical and It is a that are de edition, modern French more than it and is of less than into one volume, it has for a manuscript that is its The two hundred lines of the Rose are not and are by a modern French of the end of with and with which is an on Charles earlier and which rather than A text with scholarly have a significant on the study of the Rose and far more of the text than is the As should be apparent from this the vast, field of Roman de la rose studies shows no of any of its Guillaume de Lorris Jean de Meun ever promises to the hidden of poem and to put an end to about its It most that discussion of work will end in the
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